Kill Your Darlings

This is a movie which a young actor’s entire­ly noble desire to be tak­en seri­ous­ly buf­fets awk­ward­ly against a sense that he’s not quite ready to hang with the big boys yet. Daniel Rad­cliffe goes through all the motions that Seri­ous Actors go through in order to cast off the shack­les of unwant­ed mat­inée idol-dom. He hides him­self behind fat vin­tage eye­wear, he indulges in all man­ner of cheeky/​nefarious activ­i­ties, and he’s also seen exor­cis­ing his sex­u­al demons by being flipped onto a bed and duti­ful­ly deflow­ered by anoth­er gentleman.

Despite its mild sub­ver­sion, the ghost of Har­ry Pot­ter hangs low over Kill Your Dar­lings, a doc­u­ment of Allen Ginsberg’s path to artis­tic matu­ri­ty. Instead of a neb­bish orphan grad­u­al­ly com­ing to terms with his awe­some, hered­i­tary mag­i­cal pow­ers, you have a neb­bish poet com­ing to terms with his sex­u­al­i­ty and his capac­i­ty as a cul­tur­al icon­o­clast. Cringe at each twist and rev­e­la­tion as our hero pouts and grins like he’s watch­ing pan­das mate, over-emot­ing and exac­er­bat­ing any mild sense of won­der in order to make the mate­r­i­al feel more ground­break­ing and impor­tant than it is.

Debut direc­tor John Kroki­das coasts on Insta­gram-styled shots of dis­tressed inte­ri­ors and thick shafts of milky light in order to affect a con­vinc­ing peri­od set­ting and mood. There’s noth­ing wrong or bad about how the film looks, though it sore­ly lacks for visu­al sur­pris­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the shab­by-chic dress-up box fias­co of On The Road can still be seen glim­mer­ing in the rear view mirror.

The whole film lacks for gen­uine sub­stance, with lit­er­ary epipha­nies or piv­otal moments com­ing across as ref­er­ences or well researched facts rather than moments that have been sub­tly nes­tled into a rich, over­ar­ch­ing dra­ma. Much of the film con­sists of whirl­wind mon­tages of fun, larks and mon­keyshines. Which is nev­er fun to actu­al­ly watch.

It’s earnest too: a sequence in which our lit­er­ary rebels tam­per with a library dis­play case, switch­ing an exhib­it of canon­i­cal doorstop clas­sics with sedi­tious smut, is framed as a cul­tur­al coup, a cud­gel in the face of stuffy con­ser­vatism swung by free-think­ing lib­er­als doped up to the eye­balls. This doesn’t trans­late at all in the man­ner it’s clear­ly intend­ed, and when viewed from a con­tem­po­rary van­tage point, looks about as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as furtive­ly unscrew­ing the lid on a salt shaker.

It’s like the sto­ry is lost inside the film, with the desire for visu­al flash and the con­stant overem­pha­sis of ​“mean­ing” lead­ing to an over­all prod­uct that’s shal­low and mud­dled. It’s com­mend­able that Kroki­das has tried to breath new life into the fusty biopic for­mat, but one feels that he’s also pro­duced a movie that none of its sub­jects would par­tic­u­lar­ly care for.